Carlo Battaglia

“I have always painted the sea, even when they said I was the leader of Analytical Painting…”: we do not know of Carlo Battaglia really said the words in this way, as recounted by his painter friends, but they certainly have a ring of truth about them, as though we had seen them written down by the artist himself, if for no other reason than – at least from 1979 up to his death in 2004 – the major part of his output of paintings is openly of “the sea”. […] Obviously the artist was immediately aware of having chosen an inexhaustible subject, and apart from the sentimental pleasure of acting on a well–loved theme, there is the conceptual awareness of the impossibility of exhausting it, of the impossibility of “making a catalogue” of it. In this way analyticity is shifted from the pictorial subject to the painter subject, though without in any way

ignoring the sentimental aspect which, as Charles Baudelaire said, links mankind to the sea – “Homme libre toujours tu chériras la mer”. And so the impossibility of encompassing the sea on the canvas, and the choice of continuously taking it up, become a kind of visual mantra repeated constantly until it loses its meaning, and disappears, which in this case would mean the disappearance of the subject of the “sea”. And even though Carlo Battaglia embraces the sea with every brushstroke, at the end the totality of his action – that is, the totality of his “seas” and not the individual pictures that visibly remain, for everybody, a “sea”… – shifts the attention from the artist himself onto himself, onto the question “What am I doing?”, which is after all the essence, the lowest common denominator, of any painter who wants to call himself “analytical”. (Marco Meneguzzo, 2015)See biography